University of Kentucky Provost Christine Riordan
When University of Kentucky provost Christine Riordan sets open office hours to discuss where UK should be headed, it doesn’t take long for the time slots to fill up.
There’s been no shortage of interest in the topic of the university’s strategic direction, Riordan said, and she has spent much of her first seven months on campus encouraging that kind of community dialogue. After taking over as provost in July, Riordan’s first order of business has been the development of the university’s six-year strategic plan, intended to guide UK through the year 2020. With shrinking public funding, increasing competition and rising cost pressures, the challenges for the higher education industry are mounting, she said, and she hopes to involve as many voices as possible in setting the best course for Kentucky’s flagship university.
“We are facing unprecedented times in higher education,” Riordan said. “I always feel lucky to have smart people sitting around the table to help problem solve and think about what we need to be doing going forward.”
As provost, Riordan is charged with balancing the expansive needs of UK’s academic operations for its 16 colleges and 29,000 full- and part-time students, including the library system, graduate education, enrollment management, information technology, student support services and institutional effectiveness.
She previously served as dean of the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver in Colorado, which rose in its rankings among top business schools under her leadership. She and her team at Daniels were also credited with initiating a fund-raising system that raised more than $14 million annually in corporate and private donations and increased the college’s endowment from $70 million in 2008 to more than $110 million in 2013.
Riordan’s leadership ability and her strong communication skills were cited in her being selected for the provost position last spring, and both skill sets have come into play quickly in the current strategic planning process, which the university has dubbed “see tomorrow.” Information on the initiative can be found on the website www/uky.edu/
strategic-plan/.
In December, after completing a fall “listening tour” to gather input and answer the questions of faculty, staff and students across the campus, Riordan formed 11 workteams to address separate aspects of the developing plan. As their first assignment, the teams were asked to analyze current trends in the field of higher education and identify the 10 most significant to the University of Kentucky’s future. Their reports are expected to be released to the public in February.
“The next piece is really where we start crafting our shared vision and determining what our opportunities are as we write this next chapter for the University of Kentucky,” Riordan said.
With that shared vision completed, the teams will then turn to the development of action plans that the university can execute starting in July, along with metrics and scorecards that can be used to measure progress along the way. Riordan said the plan is targeted for completion in April, after which the community will have the opportunity to offer further feedback to help in consolidating and refining the final draft before it is presented to UK’s board in June.
“It’s a very aggressive timeline,”Riordan said. “I like to tell people it’s a six-year plan, so we don’t have to solve every problem in year one.”
At the same time, the university is currently introducing a new financial model that will allow the colleges to be more aware and involved in the university’s budget process, Riordan said. The new model will tie funding for the university’s colleges more closely to their income and improve overall transparency in how the university’s finances are handled, Riordan said.
“This year has really been an educational year and a bridge year [in terms of the new budget model],” Riordan said. “We won’t turn the financial model live until next July [2015].”
Educating faculty and staff on the university’s budget process has become increasingly important as states like Kentucky have been forced to tighten their pursestrings over the last decade.
“One of the trends that we have had nationally is the retraction of state funding for higher education, and it’s impacting us as well,” Riordan said.
In past years, the business model for higher education didn’t receive as much attention beyond university administration, because of the substantial support received from state government. That isn’t the case anymore, Riordan said. She pointed out that Kentucky’s state appropriations of $284 million for higher education in 2013 is the same dollar amount that was allocated in 2003.
“If we just adjust that for inflation, then it’s a 24 percent reduction in terms of the actual state support, because a dollar today doesn’t buy what it did back in 2003,” Riordan said.
And with an additional 2.5 percent cut for the state’s university system proposed in Gov. Beshear’s budget for next year, Riordan said, universities like UK have to focus more on their business operations and look to more creative solutions, such as UK’s partnership with developer EdR in the construction of new residence halls.
At the same time, Riordan said, the governor’s allocation of funding to the state’s Bucks for Brains program would provide a welcome boost to UK’s continuing research mission. Riordan noted that as of 2013, the university had 219 endowed professorships and chairs from the Bucks for Brains programs, and 45 additional endowed chairs funded through private donations.
Also under Beshear’s proposed budget, UK is looking to gain approval to issue roughly $385 million in agency bonds, to be repaid by the university, for multiple building projects, including $160 million for an expansion of the Student Center, Riordan said. UK received board approval at the end of January to move into the design phase on the Student Center project.
While Riordan has met with some community leaders since arriving in Lexington and is currently serving on the advisory board for Central Bank, she said her responsibilities on campus have kept her from getting out into the community as much as she would like, but she hopes to change that in the coming months. Riordan has assigned a strategic plan workgroup to examine UK’s impact on the community, including UK’s relationship with the corporate community. She has also initiated conversations with UK’s Institute for Workplace Innovation (iWin) on the development of focus groups to help the university engage more effectively with the local and regional corporate community.
“When we move forward, it’s all about partnerships — with the state, with companies, with the community,” Riordan said. “UK is all about community, in many cases, and people always like to be a part of writing the next chapter. The more we can facilitate that, the better off we are.”